FWIW, my RSS software never had unread counts. My newspaper didn't have them. I never read more than a handful of articles in any issue. If I took a vacation, I just recycled the papers that came while I was away. News is meant to slip through your fingers. That's why I always preferred the river-of-news approach. I never thought of RSS as a mail-like application.#

When you watch NBA games on an iPad with League Pass they play the same insipid ads over and over. #

The Amex ad asks us to hear Paul Pierce to tell a story how a semi-pro bowler came to his house (presumably) where he has a private bowling alley. He bowled a 230, and apparently this upset Pierce, because (as he reminds us, again and again) he never invited him back again. Great. I wonder why I ever needed to know this. But I've seen this commercial at least 100 times. Always when I'm on the road, because I watch Knicks games on MSG at home. #

Glorify the expert user features Twitter has that Facebook can never add because it has to appeal to grandma and grandpa. (Hint: That's called a positioning statement. It's also ageist so a better way of saying it is needed.)#

It wasn't what I thought it would be. The acting -- so superb. Gorgeously filmed in black and white. It starts with a caricature of old age, but then fills in the details that most of us younger people overlook. Behind the cranky facade is a generous man, who always was willing to share what he had with his friends. Who wants some life in the life he has left. Who suffers the tolerance of those around him. And who is lucky to have a son who wants to know him.#

The doddering Bruce Dern who we knew as a young actor in westerns and scifi movies, reminds me of my father in his final years. They both had dreams, neither accomplished them, but they moved the marker a little further along its path. #

Remarkably parallel to another Oscar-nominated movie, Philomena, about an old woman's searching road trip. Very different stories, with different outcomes, but remarkably similar setups, and both were acting and story-telling masterpieces. #

In Seattle today. Rainy and gray. Typical spring weather. Went for a walk yesterday, the same walk I took regularly when I lived here in 2004. This was during the bootstrap of podcasting. Every day I'd take a podcast with me on the walk. Daily Source Code, Dawn & Drew, a few others (my memory is so bad these days, sorry for omissions). They were good days, full of promise. The memories remind that I want to do more of that kind of work.#

I heard from a bunch of people yesterday who said they didn't like the new Cosmos series. I might know what they mean. The writing is not first-rate, and it has continuity problems. But it has the right spirit. When he teaches about evolution, and it's a great story -- my visceral instinct is "That's what I want to do!" And he tells the story of great people who had the creative impulse, and made a valuable contribution. Again -- that's what I want to do! I think we're born with a feeling about evolution, that that itself must be part of evolving. It might be something that makes humans unique. #

Another reason it's an important program is that there isn't much on the airwaves that appeals to the intellect. If for no other reason the show deserves our support, as people who think, and who value thinking. #

I just watched the first three episodes of the new Cosmos series, with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and it's very good. He's not Carl Sagan, but that's okay -- the show is updated, with really great visuals, and tells stories in a highly accessible way, yet gives you a feel for how different the universe is from the way it seems living our normal head-down lives here on Planet Earth. Tyson has the same passion that Sagan had. It's important to spread the news, encourage everyone to watch the show. #

I loved the story about how Isaac Newton invented modern mathematics, and how he was hassled by the trolls of the day, but science won out in the end and we got differential and integral calculus and we understood how suns, planets, comets and galaxies influence each other with gravity. #

I recently had to make that decision. My first move was to set up a Linux server, install Node on it, and it worked fine. But then I talked with an old friend, Eric Kidd, who has been doing this for years, and he urged me to try Heroku. I did, and no regrets -- the servers work so well and scale so easily that I eventually turned off the Linux server I already had deployed. I just wasn't using it.#

I'm not saying anyone is right or wrong here, but for me, now -- this is the right choice. #

NYT: "The rapidly escalating cost of doing business is driving out bookstores, threatening the city’s sense of self as the center of the literary universe, the home of the publishing industry and a place that lures and nurtures authors and avid readers."#

Mike Arrington says he's pretty sure Google read an email to discover who his source was on a leak from within Google. #

Google denies it, but the denial is weak. "While our terms of service might legally permit such access, we have never done this and it’s hard for me to imagine circumstances where we would investigate a leak in that way."#

3. What is it they have never done? If they didn't do exactly what Arrington alleges, he's not lying.#

Now consider how little regard Google had for its own employees in this classic exchange between then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and Apple CEO, Steve Jobs. If they have such disdain for their own employees, how much regard do you think they have for users? My guess is, if they want to read your email, they're reading your email, and that's that. Every time you write something in GMail, pretend that Larry and Sergey are discussing it with their lawyers at their next staff meeting.#

Someday Google is going to realize this kind of disdain hurts them financially. Their product is trust. They're throwing it away, almost deliberately, as if to make a point, it seems.#

They'd do well to study the Johnson & Johnson example for how they managed a crisis with Tylenol. In that case, of course -- J&J had nothing to do with the underlying problem. But they embraced it, fully adopted the user's point of view, and kept their product alive. #

2. If it works, it will be a space that humans occupy, like hard drives on Macs and PCs, and Facebook profiles on cell phones. This purchase is not specifically related to the product we think of as Facebook today. Today's Facebook is like search is to Google, or MS-DOS was to Microsoft. Facebook is so big, its ambition has to be big to match it.#

3. Zuck wants to bring the Internet to the next billion people -- why? Because everyone in the first billion is already a user of his network. My guess is that the next group will neither be easy to convert or as lucrative. If they want growth it'll have to come from elsewhere.#

8. Zuck is of the generation that grew up with game consoles. He wants to be the first user of Oculus the same way people of my generation would have wanted to be the first user of Marantz. (Look it up.)#

9. If you can't buy the coolest game platform for $2 billion, what's the point of having all that money. #

In the past if I wanted to link to an image, I'd put the link in the HTML. Click the link, see the image, hit the Back button. Now I can put the image in a popup dialog, click OK to dismiss it. Same interaction, this way is a little faster and less disruptive to your flow. Less jarring. I hope. Examples follow...#

Sometimes platforms are defined first around users -- Mac, Android, iOS come to mind. And sometimes platforms are defined first by developers. Examples include Unix, the web, JavaScript. #

But eventually every successful platform ends up viewed both ways. If there are apps written in JavaScript, it is relevant to users. I make apps for users -- and they have to know they're using a new platform because it works differently from any other platform.#

JavaScript is a very cool developer platform. That's why I'm interested in it, but I wouldn't be making software for it if it also wasn't an excellent user platform too, potentially. #

I did a Google image search for the term screen shot on scripting.com to see what it would find.#

One of the first images was a Windows screen shot from the late-90s UserLand CMS.#

We were really proud to have successfully gotten off the Mac web platform, which had been completely rebooted by Apple overnight around Unix, shortly after Jobs returned. By getting onto Windows, we got onto a platform that we felt was more stable and had a better future. (Didn't turn out exactly as we thought, but none of these kinds of navigations ever do.)#

Today's Fargo users will see a lot of familiar features in this screen shot.#

I go for continuity. If I labor over an idea until I find the right answer, that pretty much settles it, and I move onward. And it has a nice side-effect that old users can become new users more easily.#

The Guardian and NY Times both have stories that make Secret sound insidious. Their sources find it threatening. You'd think reporters would welcome an environment where people can exchange information without fear of retribution by exactly the people who say they don't like it. #

Offer stock, at a good price, to people who are active users of the site.#

Use algorithms to find the behavior you want to enhance. Give users equity. Not fake equity, not feel-good equity -- the same stock you give key engineers.#

Because you need us, and we know it. I'm doing a lot to help you get off the ground, and I've been down this road many times, and we know how this goes. If you're successful the users get your gratitude and if you fail, we lose our data (not that that means a whole lot in this case).#

How about another outcome. We get rich because we bet on you early-on and won.#

I don't know why but I've always loved maps. As a kid I would stare at them for hours. Practice drawing them. I liked the idea of maps, and that they represented places I could think about and maybe visit one day. Maybe the visiting wasn't even the big deal. I wanted to know about them.#

So for me, being able to put a map behind a day's worth of blogging is as interesting as putting an image. A way to focus attention on a place, a logical view of that place, without the reality of trees, cars, people, waterways, buildings, armies, etc. Just graphs in a graphic view.#

What's cool about this is that it's not a hack. The fact that it's a map is just an attribute on the outline heading for the day. I can also specify the latitude and longitude, what style map it is and the level of zooming. #

Here's a screen shot of the attributes dialog for the map behind today's posts. The center is in the heart of Fargo, North Dakota. What does it mean? Not much other than it's a really cool place to name a product after. #

The feature is not yet released. I just started work on it this morning.#

This is how you win. Stay respectful at all times. No sarcasm. Give your opponent all the respect they don't give you. People notice this, although you don't think they do.#

Force your adversary to take yes for an answer. You find out quickly who's wed to conflict and disagreement when one side surrenders.#

Another example. I was watching the gubernatorial debate betw Schwarzenegger and whoever his opponent was. At the end of the debate the candidates could ask each other questions. So the first guy goes and asks a "question" that's actually an attack. "Why are you such a jerk?" Arnold says a bunch of nonsense that he's been saying the whole night. Good-natured nonsense. Then it's his turn to ask. "What's the most interesting thing you've learned on the campaign?" A total softball question. The guy just fell over. He had been prepared for anything but that. It totally worked. He had no idea what to say.#

I wrote this in a tweet: "I think you have to deliberately temper your ambition to keep it at a human scale. Otherwise there's no integrity. You are just human."#

I thought deserved an explanation and to be saved outside of Twitter.#

My idea of integrity is this: If there's a difference between what you seem to be and what you are, then you have an integrity issue. For example, a boat with a hole in its bottom has an integrity issue if it's in water, because pretty soon it's not going to be a boat. One of the key things about boats are that they float. However if it's a beached boat, it can have a hole in its bottom and still be a boat. I'm sure you understand why. #

So having too much money is a problem because to manage a lot of money you need to be more than a human at some point because it gets complicated as anyone with a lot of money can tell you. You have to hire all kinds of people to help you, the more you have. #

There's the problem. You can't be a person and have above a certain amount of money because you have to become more than one person and you just can't do that. It's not something we can do. #

Maybe this is too subtle. But I think it explains the unhappy part of getting rich, and very few rich people are happy. I think a lot more poor people are. Because they are living at a human scale. #

"I love Phil Jackson," Shumpert said. I'm so glad to hear Jackson is a fan of Shumpert's and vice versa. I am too! He's got the winning mania. He just needs his friends to believe in him, because he's still pretty young. #

So if you're making or using tools in innovative ways, and don't depend on Facebook or Twitter or the like to spread the word, or are working on other ways, or even just thinking about them -- write a blog post and send me a link.#

You hear this these days -- that mobile is so compelling, so pervasive, that we'll stop using desktops and laptops. I don't think so. And I've always been among the first to get and use the newest and most expensive devices. I'm not anything remotely like a Luddite.#

But you can swing too far in your enthusiasm. Saying there's no use for desktop computers is just wrong. I drive a 4-door sedan. At one time I had a Mazda Miata. I've also had a pickup truck, and a huge van. And a bunch of shitty little cars that served as basic transport. There are semi trucks on the highway. And the kind of truck used to move mining equipment and missiles. And tanks and buses. There isn't one single form factor for cars, why should there be one form factor for computers?#

I have yet to see a tablet that's as easy to type on as a desktop. That can have so much material on screen at once. I am a professional computer user. Sure most people don't need all the hardware tools I have. But I'm damn glad I have them.#

I worry about this trend. I see it as the equivalent of saying we can only have receivers and not transmitters. I am a publisher and I need my tools.#

BTW, I like to switch things over on Saturday nights. That way if there are any problems, I can fix them while no one is watching. And Sunday morning, over coffee, I can start making lists of things that are broken! #

This is really two sites in one. The previous essays site is still here. Only its index pages are not part of the new site. Example. Those pages, and the home page, are from the new noteblog site, using a new template, and a new editorial process that includes a bookmarklet that shoots links into the Fargo outline. That this even works is due to a hack that Rube Goldberg would have loved. #

The author speculates that the Knicks are bringing on Phil Jackson to help persuade Melo to stay, but my guess is that it's the other way around. Bringing Jackson on is a way to give the fans hope for the future, a future without Melo.#

I, for one, would love to see Jeremy Lin as the Knicks starting point guard. I don't care if the Knicks make the playoffs, I want to see great basketball in NYC. #

To use streams, at the top level of your outline, add a #type "stream" directive.#

In the outline settings dialog for the outline, in the Overrides panel, set the type to idea. #

Now when you click the + icon in this outline, you will create a calendar structure of nodes of type idea. Each one of these items appears in your RSS feed because it has an isFeedItem attribute, which is put there when you hit the + icon.#

However these nodes are treated differently when we create the RSS guid for it. We don't generate a path to the node, we generate a path to the headline 2 levels in from the summit that contains it, a node that represents a day in the calendar. Then we add a #name value at the end of the URL to construct a guid which is both a permalink and unique. The guid is based on the created att on the headline, so unless you create two headlines in the same second, each will have a unique address. So be careful when creating these items not to create a bunch of them by wailing on the + icon. Do it more slowly. #

If you have it set so that new items are comments, that will be respected as before, so until you uncomment the node it won't appear in the feed. This option is set in the Insert tab in the global settings dialog. #

And while I'm typing this, iTunes came to the front twice, for no good reason. It's updating my iPad to iOS 7.1. Why iTunes needed to come to the front? Some lazy programmer somewhere couldn't fix a bug, I guess.#

Someone should do a study to test the theory that "letting news come to you" is an effective way of staying informed.#

Jeremy Zilar says the text should be narrower, it's easier to read. I thought and gave it a try and liked it. I made the width fixed at 700 pixels.#

Often enough when someone makes a request that I change the way something works I'll say no way, it's too much work, I like it the way it is. Then the next day I do it. Sleeping on it makes the idea seem more reasonable, it seems. #

I stopped watching True Detective after episode 4. It got really boring for me. Nothing was happening. I loved the first episodes, because they were so different from any TV I had seen. But either they got too violent for my liking, or I stopped being interested in the characters. A show has to strike a balance. I don't get off on gore and blood just for the shock value. Uck.#

When I start in the morning, I have a cup of coffee and I sit down and fix a few bugs, document a few things, tie off some loose-ends from my last programming session. Then I add a new headline at the top, entitled Morning coffee notes, press Cmd-] to demote, and marvel at how easy it was to put all the details of the beginning of a day neatly under a single headline. #

The generalizations are made by the young who have no idea what's ahead of them. The only way you stay sane is to think that it truly is unknowable. But as you get older you learn that there's so much we all do -- exactly the same as everyone else, it's really depressing, but there's no way to avoid it.#

Fixed problem with date at top of each day. Under some circumstances it would show Sunday when it really should show Monday. This is because I had a "-5" param on cmsFormatDate. Should have been "0".#

We now have background images working. If you put a backgroundImage att on the day headline, with its value as the URL of an image, it will show that image as the background for the day, with an opacity of 30 percent. Not sure this is the right value, also not sure how to let the user set the opacity. For example, the March 4 background image is a great Linsanity picture of Melo and Lin, the two Knicks who loved each other, with Coach D'Antoni in the background, scowling. #

You're in a Starbuck's and buy a coffee for $2.37. You give the guy a $20 bill. He gives you back bills and change. Quickly, did he cheat you? You have to do the math in your head. Which method do you use? (This blogger believes you'll use Common Core whether you know it's called that or not, and he's right, you will.)#

Here's the deal on Newsweek. They didn't have enough info to report as fact that this guy is the Satoshi who invented BitCoin. So their piece was wrong. Had they said "We have a theory that this is the Satoshi who invented BitCoin, they'd have been on solid ground. #

1. Google Reader didn't like my feed with little snippets, they insisted that a blog post be a title/link and description. #

2. Twitter looked like the future, with their API and Internet-scale notification system.#

Now Google Reader is gone, and Twitter doesn't look like the future anymore. Most of my ideas don't fit into 140 chars, and although I tried writing two sentence blog posts, I was starting to post some of them on Facebook, which is not a good place for stuff that's meant to persist. The rest I would just lose. That's not cool!#

Now that Fargo 2 is maturing, I decided to try to solve the problem for real.#

For writing that's not full enough to be a blog post, but too full to fit into 140.#

I would call them medium posts, but someone else already thought of that. #

There's no workable scenario where the Knicks are any better next year than they are this year, and that's no good for either party. #

Melo should go to Miami or Chicago, the Clippers or maybe even Boston. How about Golden State, what a combo that would be. A team with some hot young talent and a major elite point guard. Or even better an ego like Noah or LeBron. #

Melo is a great shooter, but he needs to be part of a team. A big part of a championship team. That will not be Knicks for quite a few years, and that's OK! #

Bring back exciting basketball to New York. For crying out loud keep Hardaway and Shumpert. We need some young promising dudes who are cheap to root for. Let's hold on to some of these guys. And keep Chandler and Stat too. What the fuck they are Knicks.#

Dolan doesn't have the gravitas to do it. And what's his name, the coach, he's got to be gone.#

The Knicks need some kind of shake-up. Having Phil Jackson come back in an executive role could be just the thing. #

Screen shot of my 1999 browser-based editing system. This was for-real. Not just a mockup.#

I like to start a new blog post when I start working on a new version of Fargo. As I make changes, I note them in the sub-outline. When the new version is released, I do a light edit, uncomment the post, and it's published. Nice workflow. Took years to get here. Actually decades. #

Anyone with a scientific background can be part of a development team. I'm seeing that with Andy DeSoto, who is a memory researcher. And I remember what it was like working with Andre Radke who was, at the time, a physics student. Those skills are totally applicable to developing software. #

The trail followed by Newsweek led to a 64-year-old Japanese-American man whose name really is Satoshi Nakamoto.#

He's got two degrees in beebop, a PhD in swing, he's a master of rhythm, he's the rock and roll king.#

The Atlantic asks why people think the Oscar ceremony sucks. Because most of the awards don't mean anything to most viewers. We understand the following categories: Best picture, best actress, actor, supporting actor and actress. And that's it. So if the Oscars are going to be more fun, you need more awards for people who are on-screen or at least whose voice is in the movie. How about best voice in an animated movie? Best comedic performance for both genders. #

So Jared Leto is a transgender mammy. Makes sense. And in a few years we'll look back at Her that way too. How about casting a real operating system? Scarlett Johansson is human. At least cast an OS actor. #

David Denby observes that 2013 was a great year for movies, something that wasn't reflected in the Oscar ceremony.#

I'm looking to revitalize a kind of blog post I used to write. One to three sentences, a few links, a conclusion or a question. Not on its own page. More than a tweet but less than a post. #

Here's a perfect mini-post. A quick comment on one of my posts, a quote, and a promise to write more later. #

The Knicks should thank Carmelo Anthony for all the fun, and wish him luck, and let him go. It can't work. There's no way the team can add more talent to balance out his talent in time to make a difference for him. His time is now. He should try to get on the Bulls or Heat, or maybe even the Rockets (I like that one). And the Knicks should sign a few promising mid-range free agents, using the cap space freed up by Melo's departure.#

The NYT has a public editor, and she's doing a great job. I think they'll eventually need to have a technological counterpart, to provide an outside/inside perspective on how the Times is using technology, since it's so central to what they do.#